Black Sabbath Back on Top After 43 Years!

The last time I listened to something, I couldn’t help but notice that my hearing is still in reasonable nick, which, I suppose, means that I can’t really claim to be a massive heavy metal fan.  Which is true…up to a point.  Apart from a couple of concerts that left my ears buzzing for days after, I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to massive hearing loss.  Yet back in the early 70s I confess to a cautious dabbling in the dark arts as a number of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath LPs in my collection will bear witness.  Obviously, none of these albums could really be construed as the real hard stuff, more a sort of metal-lite and listening back to them now, they sound much tamer than I remember and altogether more tuneful than you might expect.

Nevertheless, it seems I have retained a bit of a soft spot for Black Sabbath and as they have just taken the number one album spot with ‘13’ – their first number one for 43 years, I’ve been inspired to purchase one or two newly re-mastered downloads of worn vinyl LPs so that I can relive their majestic grunge all over again.  Back in the day, my first purchase was ‘Volume 4’, an album that used to get played a lot on ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Saturday afternoon rock show.  This was followed by the magnificent ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ and ‘Sabotage’ – the one with possibly the worst cover of all time - at which point I rather lost interest and moved on to other pastures, namely punk.

In retrospect, there is something gloriously uncomplicated about the Black Country foursome that even today warms the cockles of my rock heart.  Their Midlands based heavy industrial heritage seems to have a voice in their pounding rhythms and grinding riffs as if the factories themselves have manufactured them to order.  There’s nothing I like better than the sound of a Gibson SG and with Tony Iommi’s industrial-accident fingers on the fretboard, that fat buzzing sound has never sounded better, especially when he is constructing those spiralling duets over a crunching riff.

The only issue I have with listening to old Sabbath albums now is Ozzy Osbourne.  I really struggle to reconcile the wild young singer of then with the comedy figure and star of ‘The Osbournes’ of now.  Is it really the same person?  Weird.  I can’t help feeling that Sharon would make a scarier front-person now.  However, that disturbing image aside, it has been a welcome return to the fold for my selected Sabbath albums, ones that will sit on my iPod for a little longer whilst I revel in some industrial heritage.  Unfortunately both the industry and the music have gone, to be replaced by electronics in both instances.  That’s progress for you.

Ray Manzarek 1939 - 2013

So here we are again, mourning yet another passing.  They seem to be occurring with increasing frequency these days.  This time it’s Ray Manzarek, king of the Vox Continental.

I came late to The Doors and even then it was a difficult passage.  It was the otherworldliness of ‘Riders on the Storm’ that first guided me in and on the strength of it, ‘LA Women’ (on cassette – arrghh!) followed.  But horror of horrors, I didn’t like it much and it eventually got passed on to a friend.  Several fallow years ensued and it wasn’t until the mid seventies that I picked up the trail again with the double compilation, ‘Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine’.  Suddenly the penny dropped and I became quite obsessed with them, buying all their studio albums in quick succession.

The Doors were always in my mind a sum-of-the-parts band with every member contributing an equal portion rather than a star with anonymous backing musicians.  Despite Jim Morrison’s charisma, I always found the other members just as interesting and Ray was no exception.  Perhaps it was that Vox organ sound, rather than the ubiquitous Hammond or the fact that he played all the bass parts in the absence of a full time bass player or those key unspecific runs that he was able to conjure up or even those rimless glasses but there was always something about him that caught your attention.

In the late sixties, the guitar was the rock instrument of choice and it wasn’t until the emergence of the prog rockers of the seventies that keyboards would come into their own, but Ray managed to hold his own against Robbie Krieger’s guitar parts in a way that made them both sound good.  Whether it was the shimmering chords in ‘Waiting for the Sun’ or the Bach-like intro to ‘Light my Fire’, his playing was always inventive and appropriate to the mood.  The Doors would not have been the same without him.

More recently, he popped up numerous times as a talking head in TV documentaries reminiscing about the sixties and the excesses of his erstwhile bandmate and despite the ageing effects of time, he still managed to carry the essence of the Californian hippy that he once was.  The wild speech patterns, liberally punctuated with ‘Maan’ and the sixties vocabulary were still embedded in his psyche like a living fossil of the period.  Yet for all that, he seemed to retain the optimism of those days and a zest for life.  He was always good value as an interviewee.

Recently, I picked up the Box Set of Re-mixed Doors studio albums, which I have to say have been sensitively brought up to date without losing the feel of the original albums and it has been a pleasure to hear Ray’s playing, now liberated from some fairly murky mixes and now sounding like they were played yesterday.  In his mind, I’m sure they were.

RIP Man!

Bits and Pieces

The question is: how did I get myself into such a *!*%#! muddle?  I suppose that being raised on a diet of vinyl discs doesn’t really prepare you for manipulating digital files, but all the same, this will take some remediation.  Those of a techno-phobic nature may prefer to look away now.

The story so far: many years ago I started ripping my CDs to my computer so that I could play them in Windows Media Player.  By default they stored themselves as 128 bit .WMA files and all was well.  I then acquired a Creative Zen MP3 player and using its proprietary software, was able to copy .WMA files directly to it and all continued to be well with the world.  Then it all started to go wrong: I bought a new computer and the darkness descended.

First, the Zen software refused to work in the new Windows 7 operating system which stopped me transferring files and then the Zen died.  In order to avoid the software compatibility problem in future I then opted to replace it with an Apple ipod Nano and the dreaded iTunes.  This is where the problems really began.  Every time I imported my .WMA files into iTunes (so as to sync to the ipod) a new copy file was made in 256 bit .M4A format.  This, in turn prompted Windows to see it as a new file and to automatically re-import it into Windows Media Player, thus doubling everything up.  AAARRGGHH!

In frustration, I deleted one or other of the copies, sometimes the .WMA files and sometimes the .M4A files.  This went on for several years.  Just to add to the confusion, I also downloaded albums from iTunes (.M4A) and Amazon (256 bit .MP3) and converted vinyl albums to 128 bit .MP3 files.  This brings me to today where my entire collection of several hundred albums and songs is split between various Windows and iTunes libraries and ripped to at least 3 different file formats.  Did I mention that my daughter also has an iTunes library on the same machine and we share files?  Blimey!  Technology eh?  This would never happen in the old days where you just bought an LP and put it on a shelf.

So, what to do?  I have decided to eschew both .WMA and .M4A files and use only .MP3 for ripping CDs.  This format can be read by both iTunes and Windows Media Player so no duplication.  Whilst laboriously re-ripping all my favourite albums I am also upgrading them to 256 bit as this seems to be the best compromise between quality and file size.  It also means that I can weed out both iTunes libraries of all the duplicated files and leave only the downloads.

Case solved, but what a palaver.  As a by-product of upgrading files from 128 to 256 bit it has become noticeable how the sound graduates from CD screech to LP warmness.  Perhaps LPs had the right idea from the word go – and you only needed a shelf.

The Musical Box

Until recently I had given the so-called Tribute Bands a very wide and slightly suspicious berth, yet there is no denying that they are becoming big business in some quarters of the industry.  I blame the Elvis impersonators, who started the ball rolling after the King’s demise and now most of the big bands from the 60s and 70s are represented by interlopers – Bjorn Again, The Australian Pink Floyd, The Bootleg Beatles, Dread Zeppelin and so on and on.  So, in the spirit of adventure, I went to see French Canadian Genesis Tribute Band, The Musical Box, perform the legendary ‘Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ show, allegedly perfect in every detail from costumes to back projection and lighting.

I never saw the original Gabriel line up play live, so this had a touch of the ‘never meet your heroes’ about it and having owned the studio album since the 70s and the live version on the later archive box set, I have always had a picture in my head of what the live show was like.  Actually seeing it performed was a strange experience as it both punctured my imagining and opened up a new view all at the same time.  In some respects it rather grounded my impression of it in reality, but in others it revealed its beauty in a live environment.  I actually got the shivers during ‘Hairless Heart’ and the achingly melancholic ‘Lamia’ where guitarist François Gagnon’s guitar replicated the soul of Steve Hackett in all its glory.

There is no doubt that members of The Musical Box have done their homework and the musical exposition was mightily impressive, to the point of virtually reproducing the studio album in all respects.  The tone of the instruments, including the 70s keyboard sounds, was spot on and the playing immaculate.  But it was Denis Gagné’s impersonation of Peter Gabriel that was key to the act.  Frankly, without his uncannily accurate Gabriel impersonation (including his flute playing), the whole illusion would’ve collapsed like a pack of cards.  If there was a weak link, it was ‘Tony Banks’ who didn’t quite nail some of his solos and rather glossed over some of my favourite bits, but this is nit-picking as playing a piece from such a well known band to their fans who know every nuance is probably a no-win situation.

Interestingly, they finished with a rendition of ‘The Musical Box’ from Nursery Cryme (complete with Old Man mask) and then ‘The Knife’ from Trespass as an encore and in many respects these were better, having a real atmosphere to them.  It left me feeling that I would’ve quite liked to have seen some of their other sets from around the ‘Foxtrot’ period, but perhaps another time.

As the rock genre moves across the generations, the great bands of the past are now lost to newcomers, so to reproduce live acts in this way may be viewed as a service to those who missed out, yet the average age of the audience was not reduced by curious youngsters, but remained solidly around the 50-something range.  It seems that as long as we original fans can still get out of a night, the future is secure for the Tributes, but beyond that?  Who knows.

Storm Thorgerson 1943 - 2013

It is with sadness that I take up my metaphorical pen to write yet again about the passing of another music business personality.  Only this time the subject is not an international rock star nor even a little known fringe artist, but a designer; Storm Thorgerson, who died on 18 April of cancer, aged 69.

He, of course, will be best remembered for being the ‘fifth member’ of Pink Floyd who, through his design company Hipgnosis, created a series of unforgettable album sleeve designs through the 70s and 80s – the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ prism, the mournful cow of ‘Atom Heart Mother’, the Pig flying over Battersea power station of ‘Animals’ and the burning man of ‘Wish You Were Here’ being just a few of his creations that are welded to the Pink Floyd brand.

His unique style can also be seen on a whole host of sleeves from Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and The Scorpions to Muse and Biffy Clyro and I can’t help but think that with his passing the final nail has been well and truly driven home into the coffin of the album sleeve.  Whilst the CD still held out as the premier conveyor of music, the sleeve, in its reduced form remained a fixture but with the increasing move towards download files and music streaming through the likes of Spotify, the requirement for an iconic sleeve design has all but gone.

Which is a shame.  I still have all my old albums, hundreds of them, stored in cupboards and whilst I only play them very occasionally, I shall never give them away because they represent a repository of Art.  These days I seem to spend more time taking out covers and just looking at them rather than playing the disc they contain.  In many respects, the covers hold more memories than the music - times and places, purchases and parading.  Let’s face it; you can’t walk around school exhibiting your immaculate musical taste with an MP3 file, now can you?

Many of my old albums now spend their declining years in frames on my wall, being rotated every now and again so that their beauty can be admired by all.  In remembrance of Storm Thorgerson, I think I shall have a small exhibition of Hipgnosis sleeves up for a week or two.  They are going to be these four:

'Sheet Music' - 10cc

Peter Gabriel II

'In Deep' - Argent

'Atom Heart Mother' - Pink Floyd

Stereolab

When you are a child, you tend to accept things for what they are.  Your own circumstances have no benchmark and it is generally only much later that you have the data to be able to compare and contrast (as test papers would have it) your position in life.  My own hideously middle class upbringing did not come into focus until I met fellow students at university that lived either in a house the size of a small park or a matchbox depending on circumstance.

So it can be with music.  In the early 1990s I was introduced to the band, Stereolab and in particular their ’94 album ‘Mars Audiac Quintet’ and whilst it hung around my CD player longer than many of its contemporaries, it has since sat neglected in my collection for at least 15 years.  Or until now.  I’m not sure what prompted me to give it another spin but it has come back into my life with a vengeance and with its second coming has materialised a new understanding of its worth.

In the lull between Shoegazing and Britpop the mid nineties was a bit of a mish-mash of styles but none more individual than Stereolab who were essentially a vehicle for songwriter Tim Gane and his girlfriend Laetitia Sadier.  Where do I start?  Imagine the relentless space-age boogie of Hawkwind and then update that sound to the age of the synth – only using ancient analogue Moogs, Vox and Farfisa machines – and add in French female vocals.  Finally douse in Kraftwerk cool detachment and Asian-style synth drones and you have Stereolab.  Simple!  At the time none of this complexity really registered, I just liked the sound, but now it is all too apparent not just how odd they really were, but how different they were from their contemporaries.  And I like both odd and different.

Just for the record, I also bought the limited edition ‘Music For the Amorphous Body Study Centre’ EP, a collection of music used to complement New York sculptor, Charles Long’s exhibit, just to up the oddity factor.  However, by 1997 and their ‘Dots and Loops’ album, enough was enough and they were consigned to the ‘not played anymore’ section of my collection.

Nevertheless, ‘Mars Audiac Quintet’ is back on my iPod and its unique mix of uplifting space-pop is quite refreshing in today’s world.  It has the same ambience of innocence and adventure that pervaded the 60s space-age music, epitomised by ‘Telstar’.